My Week with Marilyn (2011)

As I said in my review for The Devil Wears Prada, which is actually a completely unrelated movie, Michelle Williams very much deserved the Oscar for Best Actress, which she lost in the 84th ceremony to Meryl Streep. Williams will win it one day, having been nominated for the award two years in a row, but that was not this past year, sadly. But despite the Academy being completely wrong once again (it’s gonna take a lot of right decisions to get me to bury the hatchet on Drive’s snubs and this isn’t helping), this film is still getting a decent amount of traction in the public eye due to its nomination and the public’s infatuation with Marilyn Monroe, which I think is a wonderful thing, because this is the type of movie that film junkies talk about and recommend to others that just sits on the shelf for months without being touched (and yes, this is a thinly veiled saying that those of you who are holding onto my DVD’s and Blu-rays: Watch them, or just give them back. Because I re-watch stuff, especially the stuff good enough to own and recommend, and ya’ll are not helping one bit), and instead, regular normal people are actually going out of their way to see an art house comedy, which is a beautiful thing.

Based off of the memoirs The Prince, The Showgirl, and Me, and My Week with Marilyn, both by Colin Clark, this movie tells the story of Clark’s (Eddie Redmayne, someone who is a perfectly fine actor, but is completely overshadowed in this film) time that he spent fulfilling his dream of working in film, here being the third assistant director for Laurence Oliver’s (Kenneth Branagh) production of Marilyn Monroe’s (Williams) The Prince and the Showgirl, and Clark’s relationship with Monroe, as she begins to open up as a person with Oliver’s cruel direction and the pressure of being Marilyn Monroe, the most important human being on the planet (when you ask someone to say who they thought was the biggest person of the 50s, they will say Marilyn Monroe. Heck, I don’t even know who was the President in the 50s without the help of Wikipedia), and her personal problems with her marriage and just a thousand different shades of pressure. And even though this is a very well-made film, with a great script, sharp direction, and a really good cast (Branagh’s also Oscar-nominated Supporting Actor role is something worth seeing this movie for as well), My Week with Marilyn is truly a film built around Michelle William’s performance as Marilyn Monroe. Granted, it’s a lot of talented people based around Michelle William’s performance as Marilyn Monroe, but it still is that (I’m saving everybody’s time by not typing that a third [and probably fourth or fifth] time around). She is perfect in this film, as she is balancing the tightrope that few actors can pull off of a real person in that it has to seem other than she’s doing an impression. And also with the fact that Williams does not look like Monroe, she has many barriers to cross with her performance, which could have sunken the entire ship. But she walks that tightrope like a champion, and pulls off what is truly the best performance of an American actor or actress this year.

In the end, while it really doesn’t boast the outside barriers it deserves, My Week with Marilyn is a charming, constantly funny, sweet, and honest movie that delves into a small piece of time in the life of an icon, and while it does have a very wonderful performance by Gilderoy Lockhart, the movie deserves to be seen just for William’s performance, which I don’t think I really can go into much more detail without just gushing for a few more paragraphs, but truly: she is perfect in this movie, and she did deserve every single award she was nominated for, and if there are any, any she did not.
8.5/10